A replica of the Four Horses of
St. Mark's sit atop the Arc de Triomphe
du Carrousel in Paris.

Here's a link to journalist Tony Wall's story in the Fairfax NZ News, "Judge's Facts Become Work of Blockbusting Fiction", about how novelist Dan Brown appeared to have used the work ARCA Lecturer Arthur Tompkins published on this blog in the Doubleday book Inferno.

Wall writes:

A colleague in Italy emailed Tompkins and told him to check out the book. He popped into a bookshop in Matakana, north of Auckland, and found the relevant page.

"I went back and looked at the article I wrote in 2011 and there it was, that passage. It's a small feeling of personal satisfaction that some work you've done has been read by someone else and then turned up in a place that I never would have expected to see it."

Tompkins says Brown gets some of his facts slightly wrong - Brown says Napoleon displayed the horses on top of the Arc de Triomphe, when in fact they were displayed on a smaller arc nearby.

He is also definitive about where and when the statutes were created, when no-one knows for sure.

But that doesn't bother Tompkins too much. "He's very clever in the way he creates a feeling that he's revealing important secrets, where none of it's much secret at all. You get the feeling you're on this enormous treasure hunt."

In Chapter 17 of Dan Brown's Inferno published May 14 by Doubleday, (and reviewed by Janet Maslin in The New York Times), the fourth book featuring Robert Langdon, the fictional Harvard University professor of religious iconography and symbology, researches the Horses of St. Mark's:

As
it turned out, the powerful bodies of the early Friesian horses had inspired
the robust aesthetic of the Horses of St. Mark’s in Venice. According to the
Web site, the Horses of St. Mark’s were so beautiful that they had become
“history’s most frequently stolen pieces of art.”

Langdon
had always believed that this dubious honor belonged to the Ghent Altarpiece
and paid a quick visit to the ARCA Web site to confirm his theory. The Association for Research into Crimes Against Artoffered no definitive ranking, but they
did offer a concise history of the sculptures’ troubled life as a target of
pillage and plunder.

Then Brown is a bit more definitive about what academics
would question:

The
four copper horses had been cast in the fourth century by an unknown Greek
sculptor on the island of Chios, where they remained until Theodosius II
whisked them off to Constantinople for display at the Hippodrome. Then, using
the Fourth Crusade, when Venetian forces sacked Constantinople, the ruling doge
demanded the four precious statues be transported via ship all the way back to
Venice, a nearly impossible feat because of their size and weight. The horses
arrived in Venice in 1254, and were installed in front of the façade of St.
Mark’s Cathedral.

More
than half a millennium later, in 1797, Napoleon conquered Venice and took the
horses for himself. They were transported to Paris and prominently displayed
atop the Arc de Triomphe. Finally, in 1815, following Napoleon’s defeat at
Waterloo and his exile, the horses were winched down from the Arc de Triomphe
and shipped on a barge back to Venice, where they were reinstalled on the front
balcony of St. Mark’s Basilica.

Although
Langdon had been fairly familiar with the history of the horses, the ARCA site
contained a passage that startled him.

The decorative collars were added to the horses’ necks in 1204 by the
Venetians to conceal where the heads had been severed to facilitated their
transportation by ship from Constantinople to Venice.